Sean Yamada-Hunter (he/him) inherited two great passions from his parents: a love for science and an insatiable hunger for crossword puzzles. His mother was a biologist and his father is a cancer researcher at the Salk Institute, as well as a daily solver of The New York Times crossword puzzle. Though Yamada-Hunter said he felt no pressure to follow in their footsteps, he did end up studying biochemistry at the University of California Los Angeles and earning a Ph.D. in cancer biology at Stanford.
His doctoral research focused on developing protein therapies for pancreatic cancer, leading to a 2021 paper he co-authored with his father. Now a postdoc at Stanford, Yamada-Hunter is trying to improve CAR-T therapies by creating combination immunotherapies.
“These cell therapies work really well, but ultimately, cancers often pop up with resistance mechanisms, and that can be problematic, especially when that’s the only therapy you have,” he said. “If you combine multiple therapies, it’s harder for the tumor to evade and maybe you get better efficacy.”
Earlier this year, he published work in Nature that combined CAR-T therapy with a CD47 blocker, which helps immune cells target cancer. But at first the blocker harmed the T-cells, so his team created a new version that protects the T-cells, enhancing the effectiveness of both treatments.
While a first-author Nature paper is an impressive feat, for Yamada-Hunter it’s rivaled by another one of his publications. During the pandemic, he constructed more than a hundred of his own crossword puzzles and successfully got one printed in The New York Times. He said crafting crosswords is a lot like doing science because both require persistence, problem-solving skills and the pursuit of perfection.
—Nicholas St. Fleur
